Web Hosting Hub Review

Web Hosting Hub is a niche hosting site targeting individuals and small businesses. They’re the sister hosting site to InMotion Hosting, so any dedicated or VPS clients they send that way.

Web Hosting Hub only does shared hosting and other web and IT services for small business, with add-ons like web design to make themselves a true one-stop shop for those who want an online presence without the hassle.

Shared hosting

Web Hosting Hub has three tiers to their shared hosting: Spark, Nitro, and Dynamo. One thing worth noting is that none of the shared hosting plans include a domain name, so if you are getting started, you’ll have to add $1 per plan per month to account for the $12 annual domain fee.

Spark: $6.99 per month full price

Spark is their least expensive plans and one of the least expensive hosting plans on the market. It’s a very stripped back plan probably intended for individuals just getting online for the first time. You get:

Two websites

10 MySQL databases

5 parked and 25 sub domain

WordPress and PrestaShop auto-installed

Website builder

Softaculous 1-click install

$50 ad credits

Spark also comes with a 90 day money back guarantee and unlimited disk space and bandwidth. However, these aren’t truly unlimited. Rather, they’re limited to whatever Web Hosting Hub deems a reasonable usage for your plan. That level is high enough that 99% of their customers never come close to hitting their threshold, but it’s not unlimited. It’s basically there to stop people abusing the unlimited resources in a shared server and causing other sites to perform worse because they’re taking additional resources.

Nitro: $8.99 per month full price

Nitro is Web Hosting Hub’s basic small business plan and in many ways is the same as their Nitro plan. However, they also include:

Unlimited parked and sub domains

Unlimited MySQL databases

Your choice of east or west coast datacentre

20% discount on Web Hosting Hub’s web design services

$150 ad credits

$10.99 per month full price

Dynamo is the final tier and adds a bigger web design discount (30%) and $200 in ad credits.

Linux: CentOS 6.6

Like other shared hosting, Web Hosting Hub uses Linux CentOS 6.6 (the latest is CentOS 7). It’s great to see that they’re using a more up-to-date version of CentOS than some of their competitors like SiteGround. But if you want more control over your server, you’re going to be looking for a different company who offer a dedicated server, like the aforementioned SiteGround (InMotion, the Web Hosting Hub sister site, doesn’t allow you to change the Linux distribution, even on a dedicated server).

That said, CentOS 6.6 should be more than adequate for most of your hosting needs. It’s favoured by shared hosting companies because it’s extremely cost effective since it’s free (no pricey licences) and most server developers are familiar with it, making it far easier to keep the cost of personnel down. That’s a big part of the reason that they can offer their services for such a low price. The second reason that CentOS in general is used in shared servers is that it’s extremely stable, great for the complexities of a shared environment. The result is a better uptime and less problems overall for your website.

Technical details

All of the Web Hosting Hub hosting plans include:

.htaccess overrides

MySQL 5

PHP 5, Perl 5, and Python

GnuPG Encryption

phpMyAdmin

SSI

Custom cron jobs

Conclusion

For shared hosting, Web Hosting Hub offers a full range of plans, perfect for most individuals or small businesses. Combined with their web design services and bargain domain registration, they’re a great place to get going online. However, their lack of VPS, cloud, or dedicated options (even though they have a sister site) limits their scalability, and while they run the reliable CentOS, if you want a different Linux distribution you’re going to have to look elsewhere.